Bruce F. Webster

I love it when technology converges.

The first key step was buying a Windows Home Server box last summer. It took me a while to get all the kinks out (read my review at the link), but since then it was worked pretty much trouble-free, 24/7. Not only do my various computers get backed up each night, but it’s become the standard iTunes repository for both my wife and me, and we use it to share (legally) media that we purchase separately on iTunes.

The next step was upgrading our internet access. We live in a semi-rural area outside of Denver, and when we moved here 6 years ago, our only internet access options were a dedicated T1 line (our next-door neighbor had one), satellite access, or a wide-area wireless (with dedicated dish pointing to an access point about 6 miles away). We went with the last option, which was given us roughly DSL-grade access (1.5Mb). However, about six months ago, we started getting flyers from Qwest claiming that high-speed phone line access was finally available in our area. We signed up and found ourselves with access speeds running typically from 4 to 12 Mbits/sec. Not much compared to some of the very high speed (>100 Mbits) access available in some cities now, but a major step up from what we’ve been living with.

The third step was getting a new HD large-screen TV this past week — in this case, as an astonishingly generous gift from our youngest daughter and her boyfriend. We bought our existing Sony 42″ plasma TV some 8+ years ago, and I won’t tell you what we paid for it then. Not only was it getting long in the tooth, with the display losing contrast, but the TV itself only had one (1) set of component inputs; the other four were all composite/S-video, and there were no HDMI ports at all. The new TV (a 55″ Sony LCD) has a much sharper and clearer picture as well as up-to-date ports (4 HDMI ports, an optical audio out, etc.).

The fourth step was buying an Apple TV unit today. This not only gives us Netflix streaming, it recognizes and lets us access that iTunes media share on our WHS box. [UPDATE: But wait! Not really! See below.] After getting it hooked up, I sat down and watched an episode of “Castle” that I had downloaded from iTunes (and moved onto the server) but had not yet watched.I then listened to some of the music on the server, then went out and connected to one of what appear to be at least a few hundred streaming radio stations from the ‘net. Oh, and I watched a few minutes of both a TV show and a movie from Netflix (we are long-time Netflix subscribers).

To quote the great Steverino, it all just works.  And it works beautifully, too — the video and sound quality is outstanding.

I’ll note in here that a few days ago I bought a Sony Blu-Ray player with ‘net connectivity. It actually sees more of the computer on our home network, but it does not recognize or play iTunes media. If it did, I probably wouldn’t have bought the Apple TV unit.

As per the headline, this is almost enough to persuade me to drop our DirecTV subscription. Almost, but not enough. I love college football and especially love watching it in high-def. I also watch (or at least have on in the background) a lot of local and national news. If and when I have streaming options for those that I like, then DirecTV will likely go away; it’s just not worth the cost.

I give it a year or so.  ..bruce..

UPDATE: Thought I was going crazy there for a while. After seeing the stuff on my WHS box, I went back later and found I could only see stuff on my Win7 laptop (which is where I keep all my ‘active’  iTunes media and where I sync my iPhone and my iPad). I thought maybe I misread what I was seeing, but then I disabled and then re-enabled iTunes sharing on my WHS box, then brought up iTunes on my Win7 laptop. The WHS iTunes library showed up in my laptop’s iTunes app — and now all the media files on my WHS box are showing up as well. But it will only play the files on my laptop. Any attempt to select, say, a TV show episode that’s only on the WHS box results in an error message.

So, I’ve got a couple of choices: install iTunes on my WHS box (which is not as straightforward as I would like) or move all the iTunes media on the WHS box onto Sandra’s MacPro (where her iTunes library resides and which, fortunately, has a couple of terabytes of free internal disk space). Since the Apple TV readily sees her iTunes library, and since her MacPro (unlike my laptop) is almost always on, that may be the easiest solution. Stay tuned.

I’ve written here before about the thermocline of truth. The webcomic Partially Clips gives a different, humorous slant; click on the comic to view it in full size. ..bruce..

Wayne Holder, founder of FTL Games and co-designer of Sundog: Frozen Legacy, is seriously contemplating bringing Sundog back to modern platforms. But he needs to get a sense of the level of interest for such a game. Drop me a line here and let me know:

• if you are interested in seeing Sundog available again
• what platform(s) you would like to see it on
• if you would like to be added to a mailing list for news of Sundog

In the meantime, I’ll be contacting those who have sent me e-mails in the past with the same questions. Look forward to hearing from you.  ..bruce..

My wife called me up to her office with a question earlier today. She was syncing her iPad (64GB) with her MacPro and noticed that iTunes listed 9.9GB of space on her iPad being taken up by “Other”, with no indication of what that “Other” was. She said she had checked on-line, found some similar complaints, but the solution each time was a clean wipe of the iPad and reinstallation of all apps, etc.

I poked around on-line a bit, found some other similar complaints, but found no clear solution or even explanation as to what was causing the problem. Since the iPad doesn’t expose its file system, I had no direct way (via Apple software) of examining it. So I went out and bought a 3rd-party application (the regular kind, not an iPad app) named Phone Disk, which — like several other similar apps — allows the iPad to be mounted as if it were an external hard drive. It worked as advertised, and some browsing via the Finder found that the iTunes Music folder held 40 GB of files — which was more or less the sum of the Music, Video, and Other segments as displayed in iTunes. None of the other folders on the iPad could account for that extra 10 GB, so it was pretty clear that the 10 GB of “Other” was hiding amongst the music and video files.

Next step was to unsync all music and video from her iPad. That done, the 9.9 GB of “Other” still showed up in the iTunes display. Checked the iPad directly with Phone Disk and, yes, there were still 10 GB of files in the iTunes/Music folder. I started opening the individual subfolders in Music and found a random assortment of audio and video files: songs, TV shows, movies (including at least one expired rental), even though the iPod and Video apps both claimed there was no music nor video on the iPad at all. There were never more than 3 or 4 files in a given subfolder, and many subfolders had no files as all.

I deleted all these files manually (via Phone Disk/Finder), then re-synced the iPad. Boom! (as Steve would say): that 9.9 GB of “Other” was now a tiny sliver measured in megabytes.

I’m not sure what was causing these file to be left behind, unrecognized by the iPad and Video apps; I did note that a large number (though not all) of the unrecognized files all had the same date (Nov 8, 2010). On the other hand, one of the “left behind” files was dated just this morning (a TV show episode that my wife had downloaded and synced); curiously, in the iTunes library on her MacPro, that TV show episode appeared twice. In any event, it’s clear that there are occasions in which media files are considered by the on-board iPod and Video apps to be wiped from the iPad but nevertheless remain on the iPad file system, taking up space.

Having looked at my wife’s iPad, I synced mine as well, and I see that I have nearly 2 GB of “Other” on mine. I plan to use Phone Disk (I bought a family license) and go through the same examination (and possible cleanup) of my iTunes files on the iPad. I’ll report back if I find anything interesting.  ..bruce..

As I mentioned in my previous two posts (here and here), I ran into a bunch of networking problems during  a recent extended business trip to a client site. One of the problems I mentioned was that I had brought along a Gateway desktop box so as to be able to use files and applications already on that box. The client site had a wireless access point that I could use for ‘net connectivity, so I stopped by an electronics superstore one morning and picked up a USB wireless adapter. Got to the client site, unboxed the adapter, installed the software and drivers, plugged the adapter in.

It didn’t work.The adapter showed up as a network connection, but it was disabled and would not let it self be enabled. I went through some of the usual first steps (uninstall, reboot, re-install), but they didn’t work. I searched the net for newer drivers, and found some — went through the uninstall/reboot/install new drivers cycle. Plugged the USB device it. Same problem. There were comments in some of the on-line forums that this particular adapter didn’t work with Windows 7, so I figured that was likely my problem.

The next day, I stopped by the same store and bought a different USB wireless adapter, this one clearly marketed “Compatible with Windows 7!” Went through the installation cycle, and this one didn’t work either. Looked for newer drivers, found them, downloaded and installed them — still no luck. Used Google to search for similar complaints, and I found them, one of which spoke to my situation. The user had Zone Alarm installed on his system. He said that he had found that he could successfully install the network adapter only if he completely uninstalled Zone Alarm — not just turned it off, but actually uninstalled it — then installed the adapter, then re-installed Zone Alarm. I tried the same thing, and it worked. Of course, as I wrote about two days ago, I then started getting BSODs on my Gateway box, which had never happened before; my eventual solution was to uninstall Zone Alarm and replace it with Microsoft Security Essentials. I frankly wonder in retrospect whether that would have solved my problem with re-installing my Sprint U301 device as well.

I’ve written these last three posts to chronicle these solutions to anyone else who might be having these same problems (and, as I noted two days ago, to apologize to HP and Microsoft for putting the original blame on them for my multitude of BSODs). We’ll now move on to some other topics for a while.  ..bruce..